You might remember that I hoped to get at least some soybeans, despite the bought seeds’ abysmal germination rate. And it looks like I might have.

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The annual weeds that have overgrown everything died off, but the soybean plants still managed to cling to life. And this week, they started to turn yellow. We might get a frost any day now, so I decided to call it quits and harvest them all. I need to mow all of the garden and prepare the beds for winter anyway, so I cannot wait much longer.

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I put all the harvested pods into a tray, and I am drying them slowly indoors at room temperature. If they behave like other legumes with which I have experience, most of these should fully ripen now and be viable. After they dry, my father will shell them, and I will run a germination rate test. If they fail the test, they should still be good to eat. And if they germinate at a reasonable rate, I will have my own seed for the future. Which would be great. I will tell you the results, when that time comes.

I harvested my summer squash a few weeks ago.

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There are 12 kg of produce in that picture, and only the white pattypan squash are worth speaking of. We converted them mostly into ersatz sauerkraut. One measly zucchini, two small marrows, and a handful of apple-sized green pattypan squash are all I got from the rest. The single yellow pattypan plant made a lot of female flowers, but they were all infertile for some reason, so any fruit that started to develop quickly started to rot.

I had not a single Hokkaido squash. All the plants remained stunted the whole summer, if they survived at all.

Luckily, all that failure was compensated by the butternut squash.

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The plants covered the trellises from top to bottom and produced, on average, almost two fruits per plant.

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I harvested nearly all of them this week. The plants started to die off due to powdery mildew, an inevitable outcome of the way-too-hot summer. I did not do much to try to combat it; it wasn’t necessary, since most of the fruit was at full size already.

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I got 37 squash so far, with a total weight of 56 kg. There are probably still about 4 kg of unripe squash outside, still somewhat growing, so I will probably get to 60 kg total. We already ate some, and we gave some away too, since there is no way we can manage to eat and process all this.

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I got two huge baskets of mushrooms in exchange for four of them, which is nice. I made smaženice from those in the picture (mostly blushers and parasols). The rest were mostly boletes, which I dehydrated. I do not have time to go mushroom picking this year, so this came in handy. Our stockpile of dehydrated mushrooms was starting to dwindle, and this replenished it for at least two years.

Now I will probably have to quickly process some of the remaining butternuts too, because about 50% developed brown spots on the skin. I have no experience with these, and I cannot find reliable information on how they affect their shelf life. Thus, I will probably do my best to freeze, dehydrate, or can all the affected fruits ASAP, with setting one perhaps aside to see how it goes.

This is what standard runner beans from plants with red flowers look like:

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There is also a variety with white flowers and pure white beans. I tried to grow a few of those last year, but the germination rate was very poor, and I got barely fifty white seeds to plant this year, hoping to get more for the future. However, as readers will remember, last year I was growing the ordinary variety too, to fill the empty space due to the aforementioned poor germination of bought seeds. I was aware that I would get some hybridization, because I had that before. The result of hybridization last time was plants with half red, half white flowers, and seeds that looked just like the standard, except the pink/lilac colored parts were light brown/beige.
This year, I only planted white seeds, and I was surprised to get some plants with full red flowers from them. Well, I am even more surprised now.

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So far, I got a handful of “standard” lilac-black seeds, a lot of pure white seeds, and a bunch of pure black seeds. I have never seen pure black runner beans before, so I asked Google. Varieties with this color do exist, but on a cursory search, they are only grown in the UK and not sold in CZ.

Which is curiouser and curiouser. If I get enough black seeds, then next year I will sow only them, and we shall see what comes of it. I will probably have enough white seeds to save for the future. I also might try to grow all three varieties at once, each in a different part of the garden. That will reduce cross-pollination, but it will not eliminate it. It is a bugger. I wanted to grow two runner bean variants – white and red – in alternate years. And now I have one pure red strain in the cellar, white seeds that are somewhat unpredictable mongrels, and an intriguing new black variety that will probably throw some unexpected curveballs too.

I know that my pure red strain should remain viable in the jars in the cellar for at least two more years, so there is no big rush to renew those. I think I can afford to experiment. Especially since no matter what I do, the remaining beans will be perfectly edible. The worst that can happen is I won’t get pure color strains, but a technicolor seed roulette.

I harvested the third potato variety that I grew this year, and as the title says, I was disappointed.

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There were a lot of big tubers in there and an acceptable amount of small & tiny ones; the size distribution was not an issue. In fact, I could barely put aside 100 pieces of ~50 g seed potatoes for next year since most tubers were significantly bigger. I am still not fully decided if I will plant this variety next year, but since it does reasonably well in the Ruth-Stout method too, I am still considering it. If I decide against it, we can eat those taters too.

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The worse-than-expected problem was pest damage. Not only did I get approx. 9 kg of tubers damaged badly enough that they need to be processed asap; there were several spots with dead stalks above the ground, but no tubers underneath. They were all eaten by mice/voles. Based on how often that happened, I estimate the damage to be 10-15 kg, plus whatever we will have to cut and throw out of this bucket.

There is no late blight on the tubers; they look mostly reasonably nice and healthy. But the overall harvest was less than expected.

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I got circa 65 kg of tubers for storage. This is about the same yield per seed as what I got from Bellarosa and Camel, despite longer vegetation time. And I can confidently blame it all on effing rodents.

BTW, you can see a mouse trap under the weighed bucket. I’ve already caught two mice in my garden shed, and I’ll probably need to set traps more aggressively during the winter. A working cat would help a bit, but then I would need to buy feed for the cat, so the savings would be essentially nil.